SES New York Interview: Marcia Kadanoff about Mobile

Next week SES New York 2013 takes place. The conference is one of the biggest ones in the industry with many different topics covered. Going up to the conference we are talking to some of the speakers at SES New York.

In this interview we are talking to Marcia Kadanoff, CEO & Founder of Open Marketing who will be talking about mobile in New York.

Who is Marcia Kadanoff?

Marcia Kadanoff is the CEO & Founder of Open Marketing, a web design and content marketing agency based in San Francisco. She is currently working on a book on “Awesome Mobile Content Marketing”. Marcia got her initial training in marketing at Apple and is well known as an early innovator in mobile, having worked as a CMO and CEO at multiple mobile start ups targeting the enterprise and consumer market.

You are speaking at SES New York 2013, could you tell us what you will be speaking about?

I am speaking about how to use mobile analytics to gain insight into your customers. In other words, moving beyond simple metrics … measuring how many mobile downloads we got … to analysis that actually gives us some understanding what is going on with your customers, what steps they need to go through before they are ready to purchase our mobile application.

What makes you want to be a speaker at SES New York 2013? Why there?

My clients ask me every day – “how should I be measuring the impact of my content marketing program on leads, sales, or mobile downloads?” Although often the way they ask this question gets down to this: “Can’t I just throw up some bad content and get to a good result”. The answer is – of course not. Only highly compelling, relevant content can drive the type of business results that are important to my clients.

I want to speak at SES NY because this is the venue people go to ask questions about how to measure digital marketing programs … to give industry leaders and practitioners the tools they need to ask and answer this question with more precision.

The world of search is changing rapidly, what would you say is the biggest change we’ve seen in the past year?

A move away from technical optimization to a recognition that if you want to be findable in search you need to produce compelling, relevant, and original content that helps to answer your customer’s questions. Prior to this year, “SEO” – search engine optimization – made sense as a fundamental strategy. This year, SEO started to diminish in importance next to content. Without the right content, it doesn’t matter how much you optimization you do – you won’t get the visibility in search you need / want / or deserve.

You are speaking on the topic of mobile, could you give us your view on devices like Google Glasses and the Apple Watch etcetera? How do you think these devices will change the way we work?

Google Glasses are going to be ideal or looking at a small mobile device and seeing the big picture. So instead of having to switch to a desktop computer to see something at full scale, you’ll be able to do so simply by putting on a headset and staring into space. This won’t make data entry any easier – necessarily – but it will make viewing in full size and potentially in 3D – a lot more pleasant.

Likewise, the Apple Watch is going to revolutionize the way businesses get alerts. Today alerts that your server is down or that a hot lead has come in via your website are sent out via email or text message. Tomorrow, they’ll be sent out the same way but routed through to our Apple Watch on a priority basis. We’ll pay ambient attention to our watches to know what’s going on – but will be able to keep our phones in our pockets most of the time.

So some good, some bad.

Instead of a nation of people who mumble to ourselves (today – when people are speaking into a headset while on the go), we’ll become a nation of people who look at nothing (Google Glasses) and check our wrists maniacally.

What changes do you see for the upcoming year?

In search, it’s hard to say. Hopefully, we’ll see more innovation like the one introduced by Drawbrid.ge which allows for cross-device tracking from mobile to tablet and to the desktop. There’s a lot of evidence that people start a search or ecommerce or other transaction in one place only to finish it somewhere else. So cross-device tracking is important to get a more complete picture of the consumer behavior.

Additionally, I expect we’ll see more and different phablets – oversized mobile phones – as Samsung and Apple duke it out in the hardware arena. Consumers use their smart phones 80-90% of the time for everything but phone calls … making an oversized phone – what some call a phablet – a reasonable compromise in terms of convenience and functionality. Carrying two devices (a phone, a tablet) may not make a lot of sense, where one could do. It will be interesting to see how Apple will respond to this challenge.

Finally, on the network side, while the carriers and operators are trying to install enough 4G capacity for the amount of data we all consume … it’s not clear that they’ll have enough capital and room to “price up” to keep up with our voracious appetite for data. Over the next year, I expect to see continued innovation in the wireless arena … where we incent people to use wifi more and cellular networks a whole lot less. Check out what Republic Wireless is doing in this area – for $19/month – they can provide wireless data service – by asking the consumer to use WiFi for their data needs (primarily) and also provide their own phone.

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